Jared Loughner
Right-wing pundits have come out vociferously against the idea that they, their colleagues and the political movement they identify with have anything to answer for in the wake of the Tucson massacre.
David Brooks (New York Times, 1/11/11) asserted that “the evidence before us suggests that [shooting suspect Jared] Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it,” rejecting as “vicious charges” the notion that the gunman “unleashed his rampage because he was incited by the violent rhetoric of the Tea Party, the anti-immigrant movement and Sarah Palin.” George Will (Washington Post, 1/11/11) bitterly denounced the “political opportunism” of “charlatans” who subscribe to the “superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment.” Charles Krauthammer (Washington Post, 1/12/11) insisted that “there is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head,” marveling that those who suggest otherwise would make a charge “so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.”
It’s comforting to think that evil-doers exist in a vacuum, and the evil that they do has no relation to anyone else. Dismissing Loughner as a lone nut, however, is much more difficult when one considers the startling number of incidents of political violence in the last few years. From a lengthy list of violent events and reckless rhetoric compiled by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, I’ve excerpted the cases that involved gunfire or other overtly deadly acts; the complete timeline includes numerous other episodes in which police disrupted violent plans before they were carried out:
July 27, 2008–Jim Adkisson shoots and kills two people at a progressive church in Knoxville, Tennessee, wounding two. Adkisson calls it “a symbolic killing” because he really “wanted to kill every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book,” but was unable to gain access to them….
April 4, 2009–Neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski shoots and kills three police officers responding to a 911 call to his home in Pittsburgh. His friend Edward Perkovic tells reporters that Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on its way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Perkovic also commented that Poplawski carried out the shooting because “if anyone tried to take his firearms, he was gonna stand by what his forefathers told him to do.”…
April 25, 2009–Joshua Cartwright, 28, a member of the Florida National Guard, shoots and kills two Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputies attempting to arrest him on a domestic abuse charge. Cartwright is killed in an ensuing gun battle with police. Cartwright’s wife reports that he was “severely disturbed” that Barack Obama had been elected president. Okaloosa County Sheriff Edward Spooner states that Cartrwight was “interested in militia groups and weapons training.”…
May 31, 2009–Scott P. Roeder shoots and kills Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. The FBI lists Roeder as a member of the Montana Freemen, a radical anti-government group.In April 1996, he had been pulled over in Topeka, Kansas, for driving with a homemade license plate. Police found a military-style rifle, ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder, and two 9-volt batteries in his car….
June 10, 2009–James W. von Brunn, a convicted felon and a “hardcore Neo-Nazi,” walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and shoots and kills a security guard. Von Brunn believed that Western civilization was going to be replaced with a “ONE WORLD ILLUMINATI GOVERNMENT” that would “confiscate private weapons” in order to accomplish its goals….
July 13, 2009—Gilbert Ortez, Jr. kills a police deputy in Chambers County, Texas, with an assault rifle. Police were responding to reports that Ortez or his wife had fired shots at utility workers in the area.Police searching Ortez’s mobile home after a 10-hour standoff find more than 100 explosive devices; Nazi drawings and extremist literature; and several additional firearms….
December 23, 2009—Warren “Gator” Taylor takes three people hostage at a federal post office in Wytheville, Virginia. He is armed with four guns, including a .40-caliber Glock pistol, despite a criminal record that includes convictions for lewd and lascivious behavior with a 13-year-old and attempted second-degree murder. (Taylor shot his ex-wife three times in a parking lot in 1993.) Taylor fires at least three rounds before the stand-off ends, including one at the station’s fleeing postmaster. One of Taylor’s hostages reports that he was angry about taxes and “the government taking over the right to bear arms.”…
February 18, 2010—Joseph Stack of Austin, Texas, flies a single-engine plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, killing one and wounding 13. In a suicide note, Stack lays out his grievances with the federal tax agency, stating, “The law ‘requires’ a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not ‘duress’ than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is…. Violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”…March 4, 2010—John Patrick Bedell, a California resident, travels to Arlington, Virginia, and opens fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon. Bedell is armed with two semiautomatic firearms and “many [ammunition] magazines.” Bedell injures two officers before he is killed by return fire. Reports reveal Bedell to be a Truther who believed that the U.S. government had been taken over by a criminal organization in a 1963 coup. In an Internet posting, he writes, “This organization, like so many murderous governments throughout history, would see the sacrifice of thousands of its citizens, in an event such as the September 11 attacks, as a small cost in order to perpetuate its barbaric control.”…
March 23, 2010—After Mike Troxel of the Lynchburg Tea Party and Nigel Coleman of the Danville Tea Party post the home address of the brother of Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) and urge supporters to “drop by,” someone deliberately cuts a propane gas line at the house. Rep. Perriello is targeted by the Tea Party activists because of his vote in favor of healthcare reform. Perriello’s brother and his wife have four children under the age of eight….
April 7, 2010—Brody James Whitaker, 37, is apprehended and arrested on charges including two counts of aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer, aggravated fleeing, and attempting to elude. The charges stem from an incident on March 25, 2010 in which police attempted to pull Whitaker over for a traffic violation on I-75 in Sumter County, Florida. Whitaker led officers on a high-speed chase, fired shots at them from a 9mm handgun and escaped capture. During his arraignment hearing, Whitaker questions the authority of the judge and states, “I am a sovereign. I am not an American citizen.” …
May 20, 2010—Jerry Kane, Jr., 45, and his son Joseph Kane, 16, fatally shoot two Arkansas police officers with AK-47 assault rifles during a routine traffic stop on Interstate 40 in West Memphis. The Kanes are killed during an exchange of gunfire with police in a Walmart parking lot 90 minutes later. Jerry Kane, an Ohio resident and anti-government activist, had a long history with police and had recently spent three days in jail for driving with an expired license plate and no seat belt. Kane considered himself a “sovereign citizen” and ran a business that centered on debt-avoidance scams….
July 18, 2010–California Highway Patrol officers arrest Byron Williams, 45, after a shootout on I-580 in which more than 60 rounds are fired. Officers had pulled Williams over in his pick-up for speeding and weaving in and out of traffic when he opened fire on them with a handgun and a long gun. Williams, a convicted felon, is shot several times, but survives because he is wearing body armor. Williams…reveals that he was on his way to San Francisco to “start a revolution” by killing employees of the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Williams’ mother says her son was angry at “Left-wing politicians” and upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”…
July 30, 2010–Camp Hill prison guard Raymond Peake, 64, is charged with robbery and the murder of Todd Getgen. Peake allegedly shot Getgen to death at a local shooting range and stole Getgen’s custom, silenced AR-15 rifle. Investigators follow Peake to a storage unit when they find three firearms: Getgen’s AR-15 rifle, a scoped Remington rifle that had been reported stolen from the range in May, and a second AR-15 rifle. Thomas Tuso is also arrested and charged with conspiracy, receiving stolen property and other crimes. Peake tells police that he and Tuso had been stealing guns “for the purpose of overthrowing the federal government.”…
August 17, 2010–Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, opens fire on the Department of Public Safety in McKinney, Texas, and unsuccessfully attempts to ignite gasoline and ammonium nitrate in a trailer hitched to his truck. Sharp is armed with an assault rifle, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, and a 12-gauge shotgun. He is killed after an exchange of gunfire with police arriving on the scene. Miraculously, no one else is hurt. Sharp’s roommate, Eric McClellan describes him as “a great guy” and states, “We’re Texans. We have a right to bear arms.”…
September 1, 2010–James Jay Lee, 43, takes hostages at the Discovery Communications building in Silver Spring, Maryland, while armed with two starter pistols and four improvised explosive devices. After pointing a gun at one of the hostages, he is shot and killed by police. Lee, a radical environmental activist, had previously issued 11 demands through a webpage that Discovery was to meet “immediately.” The demands involved the content of programming on the Discovery Channel. Lee had also declared on his MySpace page, “It’s time for REVOLUTION!!!”…
October 22, 2010–Texas Department of Corrections officers searching for a missing person, Gill Clements, 69, are confronted by a neighbor while on Clements’ property in Henderson County. Howard Tod Granger, 46, points an AK-47 semiautomatic assault rifle at one of the officers, who recalls, “He told us to get off the property or he would kill us all.” Later that afternoon, officers return to Granger’s home with a search warrant and an armored vehicle filled with 13 SWAT members. Granger opens fire on the vehicle, discharging at least 30 rounds before authorities shoot and kill him. Police find guns and “many rounds of ammunition” in Granger’s house. They also find the body of Clements, buried in a shallow grave on Granger’s property….
January 8, 2011–Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shoots U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) and 19 others at a “Congress in Your Corner” event at a Safeway supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. He kills six, including federal Judge John Roll, and wounds 14, including Giffords, who is shot in the head. Loughner has an extensive history of mental illness and substance abuse, yet is able to purchase two handguns and a high-capacity ammunition magazine legally at Sportsman’s Warehouse on November 30, 2010. In a YouTube video posted in December 2010, Loughner states, “You don’t have to accept the federalist laws…. Nonetheless, read the United States of America’s Constitution to apprehend all of the current treasonous laws.”
These individuals no doubt have a range of relationships to reality, and their ideologies may likewise vary from Tea Party orthodoxy to idiosyncratic conspiracy mania. (One person on the list appears to be a genuine ecoterrorist.) But it’s hard to deny that this seems like a remarkable amount of political violence in a little more than two-and-a-half years. (This impression is bolstered statistically by reports that the Secret Service has had to deal with a 400 percent increase in threats against the president, that U.S. Marshals are facing double the number of threats against judges and prosecutors, and that Capitol Police found that threats against congressmembers tripled in the first quarter of 2010.)
Even more strikingly, this violence corresponds to a period that has seen a major change in the boundaries of political rhetoric from both pundits and politicians. A major media figures like Glenn Beck (Fox News, 2/20/09) can now fantasize about “citizen militias in the South and West taking up arms against the U.S. government”–and he could declare that government officials bent on forcibly vaccinating his children are going to “meet Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson.” People with regular slots on major networks didn’t use to talk this way. Nor did major-party Senate candidates declare that “people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” (See the Coalition’s complete list for many other examples of media and political figures evoking violence in explicit, non-metaphorical statements.)
People who insist that the Tucson massacre has nothing to do with any of this are engaged in a desperate and dangerous denial.
Eco-terrorist? What exactly is that? Please define this for me…
Good piece, but “two-and-a-half years” should not be hyphenated, while “400 percent” should be.
“June 10, 2009–James W. von Brunn, a convicted felon and a â┚¬Ã…“hardcore Neo-Nazi,â┚¬Ã‚ walks into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and shoots and kills a security guard. Von Brunn believed that Western civilization was going to be replaced with a â┚¬Ã…“ONE WORLD ILLUMINATI GOVERNMENTâ┚¬Ã‚ that would â┚¬Ã…“confiscate private weaponsâ┚¬Ã‚ in order to accomplish its goals….”
Could this One World Government be the same bunch of multi-national corporations and financial institutions that now control our government and whose lobbyist write the bills for ‘our Representatives’ to pass into law after these same corporations finance the elections and pay for the propaganda that gets the people to vote against their own best interest by installing into office those that will represent their financial backers instead of the people that voted for them?.
Maybe we all should become lone nuts? Or maybe we should join together to oppose them?
The implication here is that folks who own guns are crazies who go off at the drop of a pin.
The fact is that most anti-gun folks have never held a firearm and have had zero education in their use, despite the fact that they are a key tool in the so-called “defense” of many nations.
The old saying that “guns don’t kill people, people do” is true. Yes, the level of rhetoric is sickening; both from the left and the right. Allusions of violence from our leaders are a reflection on the society, but a wingnut is a wingnut regardless of what someone says. Maybe he played video games and listened to Ozzy Osbourne; if Sarah Palin and Sharon Angle hadn’t been on the scene the shooter would likely have had is incoherent rants justified with some other whipping boy of the left wing press. Maybe it was rap lyrics (go go Tipper Gore!), maybe it was video games (go Joe Lieberman!), or maybe it was some nutjob preacher on a streetcorner.
The only thing that we’re left with is the fact that this guy was messed up in the head. Millions of people listen to Rush, Palin, et al, and so far this is the ONLY killing attributed to them? I think the answer is clear, though nobody thinks that the mentally ill deserve the services that they need.
I’d feel a lot safer if we had socialized medicine while keeping the new conservatives than the other way around.
The pro-war parties incite threats of violence and actual violence without regard to borders. The very same voices that call for preemptive wars of aggression call for the arrest, torture, and murder of anti-war dissenters at home.
These propagandist appeals to violence are effective. Ten years of war in Afghanistan attest to this. People do not turn on and off a respect for human life through the simple act of crossing a border.
Saturday, January 8, 2011, 4 Iraqis were killed and 10 were wounded. We do not grieve the deaths of innocents for a moment if they are not on our preferred side of any political border.
How can we expect the most fragile and unstable among us to refrain from violence when majorities accept it enthusiastically and forget its consequences momentarily?
And how is it that Limbaugh and friends can so self-importantly intone that “words mean something” when they’re parsing out the speeches of Democratic presidents or politicians and supposedly finding indirect slights to purported American exceptionalism or militarism, or lack of a lapel pin, or innumerable signs of Democratic treasons (all subtly or symbolicly expressed), which are DIRECTLY bringing about the downfall of the USA, but when right wingers and their extreme sympathizers rabidly talk openly about shooting politicians or doctors or anyone they don’t like, then apparently ‘words DON’T mean something’?!?
“The implication here is that folks who own guns are crazies who go off at the drop of a pin.”
The conservative response to the shooting is that some people who own guns are crazy and they’re going to do whatever they’re going to do. This would seem to be an argument for the regulation of guns that they typically reject. What we’re saying is that unstable people are the ones who are particularly susceptible to violent suggestions, and the increase in violent rhetoric is in part to blame for the apparent increase in political violence.
“Millions of people listen to Rush, Palin, et al, and so far this is the ONLY killing attributed to them?”
There are several people on the above list whose violence is much more directly traceable than Loughner’s to right-wing punditry–starting with the first guy, who took Bernard Goldberg’s “100 People Who Are Screwing Up America” to be a hit list.
Good article, but you need to do a little more research on your information. Hitler was actually a Socialist, why people keep linking him to the right I’ll never understand. Why do you think he got along with Stalin so well (before he turned on him in the end).
Oh, and as long as we’re talking about Stalin, how many millions did he kill in the name of keeping himself in power?
How come nobody screamed “political hatred” when Oswald killed JFK? Or Sirhan killed RFK? Or when Chapman killed Lennon. Oh wait, Lennon was not a politician. But what Chapman was, along with Oswald, and Sirhan, they were lone individual lunatics, just like Loughner is.
The ONLY reason the left is screaming “political hatred talk by the right caused this” is because their message is being rejected by the majority, and they don’t like the truth. One thing never changes, and that’s HUMAN NATURE. Human Nature says, “you only see what you believe.”
Yeah, guys, do a little more research on Hitler before you write bunk like this.
The weapon used by mass murderer Jared Loughner was a 9-millimeter Glock 19 â┚¬“ an Austrian semiautomatic pistol designed expressly for killing human beings. In their daily reports of the latest gun murders, currently averaging some three dozen a day, the mass media, including the New York Times, never reveal the names of the top executives, board members and lobbyists of companies producing the guns, nor of legislators receiving campaign contributions from them. These individuals are far more responsible for our daily shootings than the pathetic misfits, often children, who pull the triggers.
The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated at the turn of the 20th century that overcrowding increased aberrational behavior and warned that civilians in large metropolitan centers should not be allowed to own guns. Since then the U.S. population has grown from 76 million to 308 million, a fourfold increase, with a dramatic shift from rural inland regions to large urban industrial areas on the coasts.
Guns in the ghettos are now out of the question, and the notion of owning guns to protect the home has become profoundly irrational. Yet not only ignorant TV addicts in the empty states but members of our federal executive, legislative and judicial branches enjoy having domestically bred birds flushed up for them so they can blast them with 20 feet of buckshot and watch them die.
Laughed at the Palin linkage… Yes, that’s it… Sarah Palin makes people crazy.
It can’t be the massive separation of classes or the government control of the internet or laws stifling the small businesses which create jobs… no, it’s definitely Palin. That chick’s whack.
How come Loughner is just some unstable crazy nutcase and MAJ Hassan (the Fort Hood shooter) is a clear example of Islamic ideology? Their situations don’t seem all that different to me. Both are, at best, only tangentially-affiliated with their respective causes.
Hitler, despite using the term socialist, was by no means or stretch of the imagination a leftist. Naziism is fascism and fascism is a right wing ideology.
You are not entitled to your own facts. And you should be embarrassed by how easily you are misled by a single misused word.
face it, violence is a sickness. you are sick. it’s all rhetoric. i am sick with it. what is really sick is the bastards that are getting away with the loot while assange is used as a decoy, they are the real sickness. sarah palin knows what i mean. but don’t take my word for it..
http://www.truth-out.org/the-wrath-fools-an-open-letter-to-far-right66686
and another one..
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/01/09/ArizonaShooting/
listen to the irish..
how the irish saved the world..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koY6kXhQDQo
largo
here’s the simplicity of all this. divide and you are conquered. much of what is happening to you today, this is what the social disorder want you to believe. check out global non-compliance (if they haven’t blocked it). it requires no weapons. there are peaceful ways of living together in harmony without the mass media or the financial elite.
http://www.thecrowhouse.com
Yes, what about amy bishop, Richard Poplawski, innumberable other left wing killers. What about Loughner himself – he was a lefty loon too.
Loughner was no lefty. Reading Das Kapital is not enough and from what I’ve been able to find out Karl Marx had no substantial influence on Loughner’s ideas. On the otherhand, Loughner was influenced by David Wynne Miller and his theories (too kind a word) on taxation, grammar, flags, and gold. He stated as much on his YouTube videos and in other venues.
I don’t see any political motives for what Bishop did.
How do you figure Poplawski was a “lefty”?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Pittsburgh_police_shootings#Political_views
Loughner said an Ayn Rand book was one of his favorites – no lefty would ever do that!
Too bad, these people couldn’t join forces. That would have enabled them to deliver a better punch.
I am sick and tired of the phrase “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” What kills people most of the time is people with guns. It’s the so very easy access to guns by people who are nuts, who get into an argument and, in a drunken fit of anger whip out their gun and use it, who want to rob a store, or whatever. Just a couple of years ago where I live someone shot and killed another guy in a fit of road rage. Normal guy, except he got angry and had a gun. And recently a 10 year old boy killed his mom with a gun. I hardly think he could have successfully killed her without one.
There are so many gun murders in this country and we hardly blink an eye. The problem is how easy it is to get weapons of death. Hunting rifles for hunting I can understand, but all the rest is vast overkill. What kind of insane country have we become. And what’s even more insane, is that so many of us don’t recognize that we are.
SALEM, Ore. â┚¬” People who knew Bruce Turnidge and his son say they loved their guns, hated President Obama, and fantasized about starting a militia and a tent city in the woods for people who shared their radical beliefs.
Prosecutors say they acted on their anger at the government by planting a bomb that blew up inside a small-town bank in 2008, killing two police officers and maiming a third.
The father and son are on trial in Oregon in a case that has painted a picture of a rural underworld of hatred and resentment in which the defendants blamed their troubles on a government bent on taking their guns and freedom.
Bruce Turnidge regularly lectured anyone who would listen about the need for citizens to be armed to defend their freedom, and cheered the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, according to testimony. His son, Joshua, shared similar views and spoke of robbing a bank to raise the money to keep their biodiesel business afloat.
“The catalyst was the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” prosecutor Katie Suver said at the start of the trial in September.
She said both men believed the Obama administration would crack down on their rights to own guns. The attack occurred about a month after Obama was elected.
Though the two are on trial together, they have turned against each other in their defenses against aggravated murder charges that could send them to death row. Defense lawyers believe the Turnidge’s political beliefs should have no bearing on the trial, and contend the bomb wouldn’t have detonated had officers not bungled the response.
Found on Huffpost last November.
Well, Jim Naureckas, they’re certainly coming out of the woodwork, aren’t they? Thanks for that research.
Thanks, McMike, for correcting CalinCA on the whole Hitler as socialist myth.
To Jedna and Calin – I suggest you look up “Fascism” and actually read the text. Fascism is dictatorial, Hitler was a dictator with an iron fist and imperialist ideals. Hitler crushed the Socialist Party, left them behind, forsaking Socialist ideals completely.
It’s one thing to be stupid. You can’t help that. But being so completely misinformed while there is a wealth of information to learn from if you do your research, just dig a little deeper, go beyond the superficial, well, that’s just . . . stupid . . . oh, I guess you can’t help it.
I won’t continue to confuse you with facts. Your tiny little minds are made up.
p.s. Stalin was a megalomaniacal, ruthless, tyrannical, despotic, imperialist, Communist dictator with an extreme God-complex who . . . oh, I’m sorry, Jedna/Calin, I’m confusing you again.
Never you mind.
Bella, I was trying to be funny, mocking Calin a bit. (Come on. Hitler’s always funny!)
What an idiot awwww shit Im not even going to bother,your not worth my time.
loughner’s girlfriend said he had a distrust of the government, and if you look at his favorite books, both fiction and non-fiction, most of them dealt with an oppressive government of some type.
and gary is right….loughner’s politics. such as they were, have a lot in common with david wynne miller. and miller agrees, although he says he didn’t know the shooter.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0111/47329.html
there’s also an overlap with the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement..
I would put it this way…..in a country of a couple hundred million people that has seen the greatest downturn in life quality since the depression….. mostly due to governmental bungling we have seen such a miniscule amount of violence.And all the while political punditry and free speech is practiced as it never has before.A full blooded discussion of where we as a people should be moving.BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO.The Keith Olberamanns and the Rush Limbaughs.The Al Gores and Sarah Palins show this “experiment”is alive and kicking.We as a people have learned that while all Muslims are not terrorists…it seems all terrorists are Muslim.Yet we have been asked to remember not to blame “THEM” for the madness among them.BRAVO again.Of course we will do no less with our own citizens.
jedna and calin….STOP TALKING SENSE
Given our 2nd Amendment rights: The issue boils down to how we choose to speak to each other, not to how we listen. Do we choose to refuse to listen to others who’s point of view disagrees with our own, and de-personalize them by calling them a name? Should we take the time to truthfully consider all points of view? Do we open our mouths, only to tell others about our narcisism, ignorance and conceit, or is it to share insight from thoughtful reflection about events we have witnessed?
Your article raises a question of relevancy. You list 18 murders over a two year period during which, http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir-crime-murders-with-firearms claims there have been over 18,000 firearm related murders. This puts the murders you have mentioned into a less than 1% problem overall.
I’m not condoning any murder, but when confronted with the astounding number of firearm related murders, those found by you to be possibly influenced by the tea party seem to be a drop in the bucket.
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